My baby’s eyes

All throughout my childhood I can remember people telling me that I had pretty eyes. These days it is hard to find them beneath the crinkles, and I have noticed that I now have to contort my face into a kind of Joker-style grin in order to stretch out the skin far enough to apply eye-liner.

As a girl, my mother would stare into my eyes for long periods of time. “Don’t you look like your mum?!” old ladies would exclaim in the butcher’s shop. To be honest this used to freak me out a bit when I was 9, but now that I am a mother I find that, as in so many other things, history is repeating itself.

I took this photograph of my now semi-poisonous teen son :{ about 4 years ago. It was only after I reviewed the images which had captured him in that kind of early morning pure daylight which comes at the end of summer, that I noticed his eyes. Without the presence of clues to his masculinity (i.e. crumpled boxer shorts) it struck me that his eyes are luminous and lashy enough to be mistaken for those of a very beautiful girl. Please God he never reads this or I. Am. Dead.

When number two son came along it gave me a second excuse to obsess over his inherited features. As the months passed by, his baby blues began to melt into chocolate. By this, of course, I mean that his innocent baby eyes changed to a kind of deep temptress moo-cow brown colour. Wow. More girly eyes. He too must never know that we have spoken of this.

And yes, I look more and more like my mother with every day that passes. Even my eyes are changing from green to grey, just like hers……

I was crap at science in school, so I shall forever ponder what determines which features we are gifted from which parent…. If it’s my eyes they’ve inherited, let’s hope I’ve not passed on my chronic myopia too……